More than a score and 10 years have passed since an infection called Beatlemania swept through the world of rebellious adolescence from Liverpool to Lucknow.
Unlike today's age of uninnocence, in those days nothing could be a bigger blast than playing scratchy LPs on battered turntables and listening to the Fab Four belting out songs whose lyrics would never cease to amaze.
The Beatles' appeal has endured all these years. Green Apple may no longer be the producer of hit singles and chartbusters, but it still quietly rakes in huge profits every year on worldwide sales of Beatles albums.
Equally popular are books by those who knew the Liverpool lads who made it big with a band that revolutionised the concept of rock-’n’-roll. I refer to a memoir that hit bookshops a couple of years ago -- Tony Bramwell’s Magical Mystery Tour: My Life with the Beatles.
Backed by Paul McCartney’s testimony – “If you want to know anything about the Beatles, ask Tony Bramwell. He remembers more than I do” -- this memoir was touted as the most authentic total recall of what nerve described as “fantastical Liverpudlian yarns”.
Bramwell’s book is bitchy and it runs down the Beatles rather than place them on a pedestal. Yoko Ono, of course, has been slammed as the “one true cause of the group’s break-up”.
It’s odd, but according to Bramwell it’s true, that John Lennon “had a folding double bed installed in the back of his Roller (Rolls Royce) so they could bonk each other. Christ knows why...” Little wonder she ended up folding up the show.
In an interview, Bramwell explained the term “knee-trembler” which was made fashionable during the Beatles years but whose real meaning eluded us small town kids in strait-laced middle-class India. “A knee-trembler”, according to him, “would be like getting a wank in a bus shelter or getting a sling standing up somewhere outside, on the quick, like.”
Bramwell also informs us that the Beatles lyrics were laced with oodles of sexual innuendo. “Listen to the lyrics of Pennny Lane,” he urged readers. “What do you think ‘fish and finger pie’ is all about? Getting your hand in some bird’s knickers!”
That’s a new one.
